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Without Star, Often Broadway Shows Can’t Go On

To understand why the hit Broadway musical “Promises, Promises” will close after just nine months, gaze up at the show’s giant billboard over Times Square. There are the smiling faces of Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth, stars who are the chief reasons the show usually grosses $1 million a week.

The producers built the $9 million revival of “Promises” as a vehicle for Mr. Hayes and Ms. Chenoweth — so much so, they now contend, that the actors have become irreplaceable, and the show will close in January when they leave.

This is the decided downside of Broadway’s dependence on star casting: how do you recast roles that grow to be heavily identified with widely recognized actors?

Stars and celebrities have become crucial to modern Broadway, with virtually every top-grossing play and many musicals having household names in the cast. Often they come from television, like Mr. Hayes, an Emmy-winning actor who starred on “Will & Grace,” which ran eight seasons on NBC. Among the hits of the last Broadway season were the drama “Fences,” with Denzel Washington, and the musical “A Little Night Music,” with Catherine Zeta-Jones, both Oscar winners.

“Fences” was revived for Mr. Washington and closed when he left. When Ms. Zeta-Jones departed her show in June, the weekly grosses for “Night Music” promptly fell by 40 percent, and have only inched up since, thanks to the rave reviews for Ms. Zeta-Jones’s replacement, Bernadette Peters.

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Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth, irreplaceable stars.Credit
Earl Wilson/The New York Times

The concern about replacing a star, or two, is what could be called the “Producers” syndrome, after the fate of the 2001 musical “The Producers”: discovering that your smash show relies on star wattage to such a degree that when new, less starry cast members step in, audience enthusiasm can dim. “The Producers” was a mammoth hit starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick; when they left after a year, advance ticket sales declined sharply, and the show’s grosses dipped by 10 percent at first, as pairs like Brad Oscar and Steven Weber stepped in, and then slid even further over time.

The producers of one current hit musical, “The Addams Family,” deliberately played down the star actors in their advertising, discount mailings and logos. The producers emphasized the famous Addams brand — the cartoon characters made famous in the pages of The New Yorker — hoping to make it easier for actors to slide into the lead roles now held by the show’s popular stars, Mr. Lane and Bebe Neuwirth, who are expected to leave the production in March, about a year after performances began.

Even so, the “Addams” producers are now furiously seeking stars to replace its leading couple, and at least one pair — John Leguizamo and Minnie Driver — have recently turned down the roles of Gomez and Morticia.

While there is no evidence that either Mr. Leguizamo or Ms. Driver was nervous about filling the shoes of the current stars, they were unconventional choices — quite different from Mr. Lane and Ms. Neuwirth — that reflect the complicated casting issues Broadway producers try to grapple with when putting a new set of performers onstage.

Stuart Oken, a lead producer of “The Addams Family,” said he was deep into the recasting process now and “completely” committed to continuing on Broadway with new actors.

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Advertising for “The Addams Family” keeps the emphasis off its stars, Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth, center.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“It was always our strategy to ‘put the family first,’ and build for the long term,” Mr. Oken wrote in an e-mail response to questions.

Still, Mr. Lane and Ms. Neuwirth clearly have become essential to ticket sales. When Mr. Lane took a week’s vacation from “The Addams Family” last month, the weekly grosses slid to $764,231 from $1.1 million. Ms. Zeta-Jones’s vacation from “Night Music” in February caused a similarly intense chill at the box office.

Some producers firmly believe that when they refill a role, they have to “cast up” — finding a new actor who is an even bigger name than the original. This can be a problem when the original is already a star. The producers of “Night Music” opted for a big name in theater circles, Ms. Peters, rather than try to find an even bigger screen star than Ms. Zeta-Jones. (“Night Music” has earned back its original costs.)

The producers of the play “Race,” meanwhile, went from the American television star James Spader to a British replacement, the actor and comedian Eddie Izzard, in June. The grosses ended up dropping roughly 30 percent before the play closed, as planned, in August.

Broadway has a long tradition of name replacements in long-running hit shows. What musical actress of a certain age didn’t play the title character in “Hello, Dolly!” during its initial run of almost seven years? More recently, “Cabaret” replaced Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson with Neil Patrick Harris and Brooke Shields, actors with a Hollywood sheen. For the last revival of “Fiddler on the Roof,” Harvey Fierstein and Rosie O’Donnell stepped into lead roles — and added juice to the box office — after Alfred Molina and Randy Graff finished their runs.

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Mr. Lane and Matthew Broderick in the hit “The Producers”; when they left, their box office appeal was hard to sustain.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“The challenge is if you started with a star, you’re stuck, because you’re always going to need a star,” said Jeffrey Seller, a lead producer of the current “West Side Story” revival and “In the Heights.”

Tom Viertel, a lead producer of “The Producers,” recalled that he and his partners convened a focus group to discuss “re-imaging” the musical as Mr. Lane and Mr. Broderick were preparing to leave. The advertising had been built largely around the rubbery faces of those two men, and they had to come up with images that would newly excite theatergoers.

“There were ads that included chorus girls, that highlighted our Tony Awards, that had Cady Huffman lying on her side,” Mr. Viertel recalled. “We never really fixed on one image, in the end. We kept changing it up over the six-year run.”

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Beth Williams, one of the lead “Promises, Promises” producers, said her team had “considered recasting, started putting lists together, but we didn’t think there was a way to replace Sean and Kristin” and ensure extending the show’s financial track record as well.

The musical has grossed more than $27 million since opening in April. Casting new leads for the show could cost at least $100,000 in rehearsal time, advertising and other expenses. The production received mixed reviews from critics, and won only one Tony Award in June, for Katie Finneran, a supporting actress. (It was not even nominated for best musical revival.)

Discussions about new casting never reached the point of talking to actors or their agents about joining “Promises.” Ms. Williams declined to provide the names of anyone she was mulling over as replacements.

“My dream casting would be for Sean and Kristin to extend for another year,” she said, “and keep that billboard in Times Square.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 27, 2010, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: When Marquee Names Go, Certain Shows Can’t Go On. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe